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THE ROMANTIC AGE

THE SECOND GENERATION OF ROMANTIC : , SHELLEY and KEATS

- they all left , visited and died young - return to complex forms of versification and richer language

- interest in the world of ancient - more interest in Politics (especially Byron) - different view of Nature (less idealistic) George Gordon Byron 1. Life (1788 – 1824)

• In 1809 he set out on a tour of Spain, , , , Greece and the Middle East.

• After his return to England in 1812, he published the first ‘two cantos’ of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.

• He became a literary and social celebrity, but then he left England in 1816, never to return. • He lived in Geneva, where he became a friend of the .

• He moved to , where he began his masterpiece, the mock-epic .

• In 1819 he moved to Milan where he became involved H. Meyer, , 1816, Victoria in the patriotic plots against Austrian rule. and Albert Museum,

• He committed himself to the Greek struggle of independence from Turkey.

• His heart is buried in Greece, his body is interred in England.

Performer - Culture & Literature

George Gordon Byron 2. Main works

• Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812-1818).

• The (1813), , and Lara (1814): a series of verse narratives.

, a tragedy (1817).

• Don Juan (1819-24).

Jonny Lee Miller is Byron, in the BBC Byron.

Performer - Culture & Literature George Gordon Byron 4. The

• A moody, restless and mysterious romantic rebel. • Hides some sin or secret in his past. • Characterised by proud individualism. • Rejects the conventional moral rules of society. • An outsider, isolated and attractive at the same time.

Performer - Culture & Literature George Gordon Byron 4. The Byronic hero

• He is of noble birth, but wild and rough in his manners.

• His looks are hard, but handsome.

• Has a great sensibility to nature and beauty.

• Bored with the excesses of the world.

• Women cannot resist him, but he refuses their love.

Performer - Culture & Literature George Gordon Byron 5. Byron’s individualism

• Byron firmly believed in individual liberty

• He hated any sort of constraint

• He wished to be himself without compromises

• He denounced the evils of society by using

• His mood and choice of themes were romantic

Performer - Culture & Literature George Gordon Byron 6. Byron’s view of nature

• Nature is not a source of consolation and joy.

• It does not embody any theory.

• It has no message to convey.

the wildest and most exotic natural landscapes reflect the poet’s mood and feelings

Performer - Culture & Literature 1. Life (1795 – 1821)

• Born in London in 1795. • Well educated at a school in Enfield. • Early passion for reading . • Family plagued by death. • Doomed love story with owing to his poverty and bad health • Own illness tubercolisis. • Died in 1821 in . A portrait of John Keats, 1817

Performer - Culture & Literature John Keats 2. Main works

1818 , a long, mythological poem

The Eve of St Agnes, characterised by romantic features.

La Belle Dame Sans Merci, a ballad which displayed a taste for medieval themes and form. The great .

1820 , begun in 1818 and published in 1820.

Performer - Culture & Literature John Keats 3. His poetry

• His lyrical are not fragments of a spiritual , like the lyrics of Shelley and Byron.

• A personal experience is behind the odes of 1818 it is not their substance.

• The pronoun ‘I’ stands for a universal human being.

• The common Romantic tendency to identify scenes and landscapes with subjective moods and emotions is rarely present in his poetry.

Performer - Culture & Literature John Keats 4. Keats and imagination

Keats’s belief in the supreme value of imagination made him a Romantic poet.

His imagination takes two main forms: 1. the world of his poetry imagined, artificial;

2. his poetry comes from imagination his work is a vision of what he would like human life to be like.

Performer - Culture & Literature John Keats

5. Keats’s beauty

Beauty strikes his imagination.

is perceived by the senses; all the senses are involved in this process.

This ‘physical beauty’ is caught in all the forms nature acquires. Physical beauty can also These two kinds of beauty are produce a much deeper closely interwoven, since the experience of joy, which former, linked to life, enjoyment, introduces a sort of ‘spiritual decay and death, is the beauty’, that is the one of love, expression of the latter, related to friendship, poetry. eternity.

Performer - Culture & Literature John Keats 6. The poet’s task

The poet has what he called ‘’:

refers to the capability the poet has to deny his certainties and personality in order to identify himself with the object of his inspiration.

When the poet can rely on this negative capability, he is able to seek sensation, which is the basis of knowledge since it leads to beauty and truth, and allows him to render it through poetry.

A new view of the poet’s task.

Performer - Culture & Literature John Keats 7. Imagery in Keats

• Synaesthetic:

fusion of visual and Synaesthetic tactile senses.

• Concrete: tangible material forms. Concrete Imagery Pictorial • Pictorial: visual often personified.

• Compressed: condensed images Compressed to highlight intensity.

Performer - Culture & Literature Percy Bysshe Shelley 1. Life (1792 –1822)

• Born in Sussex in 1792. • Studied at Oxford University from which he was expelled because of a radical pamphlet, . • Married to 16-year-old Harriet Westbrook. Some years later he ran away with Mary Godwin, daughter of . • In 1818 Shelley and Mary left England and settled in Italy. • Died in 1822 while sailing in the

Louis Edouard Fournier, The Cremation of Shelley, 1889 Bay of Spezia, near .

Performer - Culture & Literature Percy Bysshe Shelley 2. Main works

1817 The Revolt of , a revolutionary poem about the power of love.

1819 to the West Wind.

1819 , a verse tragedy.

1820 Unbound, a lyrical drama dealing with the theme of rebellion.

1821 A Defence of Poetry, an unfinished essay concerning the importance of poetry.

Performer - Culture & Literature Percy Bysshe Shelley 3. Themes

Shelley’s works reveal:

• his restless spirit;

• his refusal of social conventions and political oppression;

• his faith in a better future.

He believed in freedom and love the remedies for the faults and evils of society.

Through love man could overcome any political, moral and social conventions. Performer - Culture & Literature Percy Bysshe Shelley 4. Shelley’s poetry

Poetry

the expression of understood as revolutionary imagination creativity, seriously meant to change the reality of an increasingly material world

Performer - Culture & Literature Percy Bysshe Shelley 5. Shelley’s nature

Nature Unlike Wordsworth, it is not the real world.

It is a beautiful veil that hides the eternal truth of the Divine Spirit.

It provides the poet with beautiful images, such as the wind.

The favourite refuge from the The interlocutor of the poet’s disappointment and injustice of melancholy dreams and of his the ordinary world. hopes for a better future.

Performer - Culture & Literature Percy Bysshe Shelley 6. The poet’s task

The poet is

• a prophet;

• a Titan challenging the cosmos.

His task is to help mankind to reach an ideal world where freedom, love and beauty are delivered from tyranny, destruction and alienation.

Performer - Culture & Literature Percy Bysshe Shelley 7.

The wild autumn wind a living symbol of the spiritual forces able

•to regenerate the fading or decadent life of nations;

•to help heroic spirits;

•to scatter their burning words, ‘like ashes from an J. Turner, Waves breaking against the wind, 1835, London, Tate unextinguished hearth’, among mankind.

Performer - Culture & Literature